www.elsblog.org - Bringing Data and Methods to Our Legal Madness

04 June 2006

Guest Blogger: Dan Kahan

This week's guest blogger is Dan Kahan who, among other things, will blog about The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Deputy Dean
at Yale Law School. In addition to risk perception, his areas of
research include criminal law and evidence. Prior to coming to Yale in
1999, Professor Kahan was on the faculty of the University of Chicago
Law School. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall
of the U.S. Supreme Court (1990-91) and to Judge Harry Edwards of the
United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1989-90). He
received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his J.D. from Harvard
University.

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars from
Yale and
other universities interested in studying how
cultural values shape the public's risk perceptions and related policy
beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency
of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact
(e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death
penalty
deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to
values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using
the methods
of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology,
communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this
phenomenon and to
identify the mechanisms through which it operates.
The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify
processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society
can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that
is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks
and consistent with sound public
policymaking.